Library of Congress acquires black oral histories

Jun. 25, 2014
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Maya Angelou in 2008. / Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

by Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY

by Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY

The Library of Congress announced Tuesday it has acquired 9,000 hours of video interviews with 2,600 black Americans who define the black experience in America.

A project called The History Makers has been collecting the interviews for years, quizzing people from the oldest living black cowboy to late poet Maya Angelou, from President Obama when he was an Illinois state senator to a survivor of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, and from activist/educator Angela Davis to late actress/activist Ruby Dee. The History Makers is donating the collection to the Library of Congress.

The collection now will join the ranks of a series of interviews done of former slaves as a WPA project that included late author Zora Neale Hurston.

"This culturally important collection is a rich and diverse resource for scholars, teachers, students and documentarians seeking a more complete record of our nation's history and our people," James Billington, the librarian of Congress, said in a statement Tuesday.

The collection includes 14,000 analog tapes, 3,000 DVDs, 70,000 paper documents and 30,000 digital images, according to the Library of Congress.

Lawyer and television producer Julieanna Richardson launched the non-profit History Makers in 1999 to preserve the oral histories of black Americans. She told CBS she wanted the history preserved and understood.

"I want the African-American child to understand their roots but I also want mainstream America to understand the contributions of black people in this country," she said.

Bob Butler, president of the National Association of Black Journalists and a reporter for KCBS Radio, is one of those interviewed for The History Makers. Butler says he talked during the interview about growing up growing up in California, Connecticut and other places as a Navy brat. He also talked about his work as a reporter with The Chauncey Bailey Project, an effort to finish the investigative work of a well-liked and respected Oakland Post editor who was murdered in 2007. Bailey was looking into allegations of violence and fraud at a bakery that had been a Bay Area institution.

"The thing about The History Makers is they want to talk about your life, they want to talk about where you were born, how you grew up, so they take a long time and talk about the time you were born up until now," Butler said.

Of the Library of Congress acquisition, Butler said, "I think it's exciting ... It's going to realloy memorialize part of those people's lives. I'm actually humbled that I'm going to be included in there."

Anthony Reed, co-founder of the National Black Marathoners Association, also is among the thousands who have been interviewed for the project. The Dallas-based runner studied black history while growing up in the 1960s and believes preserving history is crucial.

"Whenever I felt that I couldn't accomplish a goal, I always thought about the earlier black struggles," he said. "Their struggles cleared the path for me to two undergraduate and two graduate degrees. And later, the accomplishments of black distance runners, such as Ted Corbitt, Frederick Davis III, Dick Gregory, and Ricky Cox, motivated me to complete marathons on seven continents."

Richardson told CBS that the Library of Congress was the most fitting place for the collection. "You don't work this hard on a project and not want to have it preserved correctly," she said.